The meanings of certain acronyms and abbreviations used herein are given in Table 1.
TABLE 1Acronyms and AbbreviationsMPEGMoving Picture Experts GroupPCATProgram CatalogPVRPersonal Video RecorderRBReview BufferVFVirtual File
As digital transmission techniques have advanced, users are afforded the opportunity of navigating among many media content channels and services, such as movies, television shows, web content available from external media content providers as well as content located on the user's own system, such as a home set-top box, computer, and a variety of mobile communication devices. Moreover, the media content may arrive in many different protocols and formats. Review buffers in the user equipment enable media content to be captured and retained for subsequent playback.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,971,121 to West et al. discloses a system for managing and accessing media content received via a plurality of display channels and stored in a plurality of buffers in a storage device. The system associates the plurality of buffers with a composite buffer file.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,725,919 to Thiagarajan et al. discloses a short-term content buffer that maintains segments of audio and/or video content. The content segments are identified with segment identifiers, which enable management and playback of the content segments. In an embodiment, independent video content segments corresponding to a particular broadcast channel can be identified by associated content segment identifiers and the video content segments can be recorded together to generate a single recording of the content.